Why yes! Because the alternative of 4 years of Wall Street runamuck, destruction of anything that a normal person might fall back on in times of hardship, and foreign military involvements would be so much better. Get it straight - at least the D's don't have the clowns trying to run their circus.

All sporting contests have arbitrary limits. Why ten pins in bowling instead of 9? Why is an American football field 100 yards long instead of 120? Soccer field sizes can vary, but within limits. In general, the rules make the sport. And rules change over time. Both football and baseball have updated rules to make the games more appealing to audiences and improve safety. F-1 and NASCAR have equipment limitations which change to keep up with technology. In this case, the rule you decry is only to add spectator involvement, something that is now possible with today's technology and seen as highly desirable by the folks fronting the money to promote this sport. Stop complaining about what makes a sport a sport, as opposed to a bunch of people getting together to do something random.

But as long as they're under outside pressure to end the program, it becomes a matter of face to defend it.

If governmental employees think that "saving face" is more important than doing the right thing, they shouldn't be governmental employees any more.

The R's are filling up the clown car again. Will THE Donald be next? Or will Sarah Palin try to climb in hatchback before he and Teddy Cruz can lock it? Maybe Jebediah will announce! Then the banksters can masturbate their piles of money over all of them and they will coast to victory!

Well, I agree, but we all know Lizzie will never get bankers' money and so it's H's turn. It will be an interesting election.

... which will boost inflation and reduce the value of everyone's money.

which will boost inflation and reduce the value of everyone's money so little that you wouldn't even notice. FTFY. Rich people might have enough money affected that it might be a minor inconvenience to them, which is why they, their news organizations, and their useful idiots in politics think this needs to be such a worry for all of us.

Keep telling me how this is highly moral and peachy ;)

Well, moral I don't know about, but it seems just peachy for the bankers, doesn't it?

If I were a betting man I would think Ted Cruz will be our next president.

Yeah. Good thing you're not a betting man. If R's run Cruz, Hillary won't need to bring out her base - fear will do that for her.

As someone to the left of the D's, I love it when the wingnuts get their man in - it means I don't have to waste my vote on some retarded D and can cast my vote with a clear conscience for the Socialist or WFP candidate.

To think any part of the government is efficient is laughable at best.pTo think that ANY LARGE ORGANIZATION is efficient is laughable at best. FTFY.

No, you make the move if:

r_cl r_l and
C_clo C_l

Where r_l/r_cl = risk of catastrophic loss on local config/cloud config, similar for the costs.

You can calculate the cost of keeping production and migration systems running for a migration and shakedown period, as well as the risk/cost benefit of continuing the migration or shutting it down at any point. As such, one can estimate these costs and there are some points in the mathematical domain where it makes sense to migrate.

However, I believe that we would strenuously disagree about the risk of a cloud system vs. a locally controlled system. Here's one way to think about it, though...

I'd think that the cost of a contract on your system (should anyone choose to make one thereupon) would be considerably short of $100K. On Amazon's entire system? Millions. Refute that notion of risk estimation.

It would have been much easier and cost effective to just take the first management position and work into retirement at the hospital or bank or retail corp or manufacturer or any of the other places I worked at in the past in IT.

Ha... ha.... ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.... Oh excuse me. That was droll. As if any of the folks who moved up had any more job security than you. No, you don't get that sort of security until you hit the point where you can pre-negotiate a golden ticket on the way out. And that sure as hell isn't first-level management.

I did as you proposed. I was an individual contributor who moved up into management and, honestly, only after I'd taken fifteen years moving up the IC ranks to the highest levels my company had and did some serious soul searching about my ability to do the job, having seen both good and bad managers in my career. The result? After fifteen years I still often got paid less than some of the higher-level technical folks I managed and the final layoff came regardless.

In any case, promulgating the notion that being a manager somehow insulates you from idiots higher up the chain really isn't fair. In most orgs, first level managers are seen as about on par with managers of a local Pizza Hut and have similar job security. One who likes working with the technical folk and so stays at this level finds this out eventually. It's up or out even there. I wanted to stay out of the always political shark fight higher up, so I learned enough about it to play at my level, I enjoyed working in my various jobs with a lot of great technical folks, but I got laid off the same as the rest of my teams. In fact, in my last FTE position, I and another "senior" manager were shown the door while our teams stayed on.

I'm now a contractor/consultant after my final layoff and, though I make a bit less than I did when I was an FTE and have even less job security, I choose how much I work and I work on things that are interesting to me with people I generally like. On the whole, it's a better life.

The problem is that most organizations have a variety of tasks at different priorities, many of which do not fit into a arbitrarily defined sprint length. In reality, the wider the spread of job sizes and priority, the more overhead scheduling takes. You split loads into less varying sets and tune the scheduling process for the teams that gets each set for that. Basically, if you don't control the task variance, no scheduling algorithm, agile or otherwise, will help. If you have too many jobs, the same. But ultimately, it is a relatively simple management problem to solve. Trying to pay for it though? Well, good luck with finance...

And, frankly, if you didn't already know what these were, you haven't been paying attention. Which worries me. If smart people around here are too dumb to understand what this stuff is, who the hell is watching?

Funny, when I here government inspectors, I always think incompetence.

Funny, when I think of government inspectors, I always think of corporate malfeasance. Bit maybe I've just been paying for late, over-budget governmental contracts for too long.

If family leave was decently supported in this country, we would not be having this problem.